Objects

"Running Deer" by Marek Szwarc is – next to the sculpture "Maturation" (MPOLIN-M38) – one of the most outstanding examples of the artist's craftsmanship in forging in copper plate. It is also an outstanding work of modern Jewish art, which in the 1920s was created by avant-garde artists from the "Jung Idysz" circle, among them Marek Szwarc. In their search for the Jewish idiom in modern art, they referred to the iconography of Jewish religious art, also drawing on the folk simplicity of its imagery. Szwarc and his colleagues creatively developed these traditional motifs from Jewish religious art, giving them a contemporary touch.

The expressive redrawing of the animal's silhouette with the fluid, linearly curved body line caught in flight, makes it a symbolic representation, not an anatomical one. Present in synagogue polychromes and tombstone decorations, the deer symbolises the dispersed people of Israel who will return from exile to their homeland. It is also an emblematic sign of Israel's redemption when the Messiah comes (Is 35:6).

Though created in Paris in 1926, the sculpture was also shown in Poland at Szwarc's exhibitions in Łódź and Warsaw. From the Łódź exhibition in April 1927 – in the artist's album kept in the POLIN Museum (see MPOLIN-A12.1.7) – there is a photograph of the Yellow (Złota) Hall of the Grand Hotel (72 Piotrkowska Street) filled with Szwarc's works. Sculptures were placed on pedestals, paintings and metalworks hung on the walls in several rows; even the fireplace was fitted with works of art, and on its elegant surround stood the metal sculpture Running Deer, whose slender, beautiful silhouette was reflected in the mirrors. Among the works on display was Deer (standing on the ground, to the left of the fireplace); it is a brass-plate transposition of a motif known from a painting in the collection of the POLIN Museum (see MPOLIN-M32). The exhibition was received with acclaim; the Łódź press published enthusiastic reviews, which were also pasted into the album: "Marek Szwarc forges in copper, [...] and it has to be admitted that he extracts from it effects of unique expression. Especially biblical themes will not find in any material, neither in stone nor in wood, such an ideal expression as in the shiny, golden plane bent and pressed with the artist's hammer and chisel". (ja, Exhibition of Marek Szwarc, Głos Polski 1927, no 102, p. 4).

Renata Piątkowska